THE EARLY DRAMA
In the growth of most national literatures the theater has developed
side by side with the drama, the stage doing for the play what the
printing press did for the essay, poem, and novel. But in America,
the land of a transplanted civilization, the order was changed and
the first plays were supplied from abroad just as the other forms of
literature were. In the history of the American stage, therefore, the
successive steps were the presentation of English plays by American
amateurs in regular audience rooms with improvised stages; then the
development of semiprofessional and wholly professional companies
who played short seasons at irregular intervals; then the erection
of special playhouses; and finally the formation of more permanent
professional companies, both English and American,--all of which took
place in the course of nearly two generations before the emergence of
any native American drama. Recent investigations have so frequently
pushed back the years of first performances, playhouses, and plays that
now one can offer such dates only as subject to further revision.
[Illustration:
CHRONOLOGICAL CHART I. AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1600-1800
JAMES I 1603-'25
CHARLES I '25-'49
PROTECTORATE '49-'60
CHARLES II '60--'85
JAMES II '85-'89
WM.-MARY '89--1702
ANNE '02-'14
GEORGE I '14--'27
GEORGE II '27--'60
GEORGE III '60------>1820
1600 ' ' ' ' 1700 ' ' ' ' 1800
Thomas Morton (1575?------1646)
Nathaniel Ward (1578-------1652?)
Roger Williams (1604--------------1683)
Michael Wigglesworth (1631------------1705)
Anne Bradstreet (1612----------1672)
Increase Mather (1639--------------1723)
Cotton Mather (1663--------------1728)
Samuel Sewall (1652----------------1730)
Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-------------1727)
Jonathan Edwards (1703-------1758)
Benjamin Franklin (1706--------------1790)
Michel de Crèvecoeur (1731--------------->1813)
Francis Hopkinson (1737--------1791) AMERICAN REVOLUTION--
John Trumbull (1750---------1831)
Philip Freneau (1752-------->1832)
Timothy Dwight (1752-------->1817)
Joel Barlow (1754------->1812)
Brockden Brown (1771----->1810)
AMERICAN REVOLUTION >1775-1780<
Washington Irving (1783--->1859)
Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-->1867)
Joseph Rodman Drake (1795->1820)
J. Fenimore Cooper (1789-->1851)
Wm. Cullen Bryant (1794->1878)
]
According to the "Cambridge History of American Literature," "there
seem to have been theatrical performances in this country since 1703."
Paul Leicester Ford in his "Washington and the Theater" says, "that
there was play-acting in New York, and in Charleston, South Carolina,
before 1702, are unquestioned facts." In 1718 Governor Spottswood of
Virginia gave an entertainment on the king's birthday, the feature of
which was a play, probably acted by the students of William and Mary
College, as there are references to later events of this sort. The
Virginia governor's patronage bore different fruit from the early
indorsement of playing in staid Massachusetts, for Samuel Sewall
recorded in his diary of March 2, 1714, a protest at the acting of a
play in the council chamber. "Let not Christian Boston," he admonished,
"goe beyond Heathen Rome in the practice of Shamefull Vanities." On the
other hand, Williamsburg, Virginia, had its own theater before 1720,
New York enjoyed professional acting and a playhouse by 1732, and in
Charleston, South Carolina, the use of the courtroom was frequent in
the two seasons before the opening of a theater in the winter of 1736.
These slight beginnings, with further undertakings in Philadelphia,
doubtless gave Lewis Hallam, the London actor, courage to venture
over with his company in 1752. With his twelve players he brought a
repertory of twenty plays and eight farces, the majority of which had
never been presented in America; and since the year of their arrival
the American theater has had a consecutive and broadening place in the
life of the people.
The beginnings of drama in America, to distinguish them from the
early life of the theater, are not quite clearly known. The first
romantic drama, and the first play written by an American and
produced by a professional company, was Thomas Godfrey's "The Prince
of Parthia," completed by 1759 and acted in 1767 at the Southwark
Theater, Philadelphia. The first drama on native American material--an
unproduced problem play--was Robert Rogers's "Ponteach," published
in London in 1766. The first American comedy to be produced by a
professional company was Royall Tyler's "The Contrast," acted in 1787
at the John Street Theater, New York. The first professional American
playwright was William Dunlap (1766-1839), author and producer, who
wrote, adapted, and translated over sixty plays, operas, sketches,
farces, and interludes, of which at least fifty were produced and
nearly thirty have been published. The first actor and playwright of
more than local prominence was John Howard Payne (1791-1852), more
original than Dunlap and equally prolific, with one or two great
successes and eighteen published plays to his credit. The history
of the American drama, as yet unwritten, will be a big work when it
is fully done, for the output has been very large. Three hundred and
seventy-eight plays are known to have been published by 1830 and
nearly twice that number to have been played by 1860. In the remainder
of this chapter, the aim of which is to induce study of plays within
the reach of the average college class, four dramas will be discussed
because they are interesting in themselves and because they are early
representatives of types which still prevail.
The first is "The Prince of Parthia," a romantic tragedy by Thomas
Godfrey (1736-1763). He was the son of a scientist, a youth of cultured
companions, West the painter and Hopkinson the poet-composer, and his
almost certain attendance at performances of the American company
of actors led him, in addition to his juvenile poems, to make his
ambitious attempt at drama. "The Prince of Parthia" is evidently
imitative, and yet no more so than most American poems, essays, novels,
and plays written in the generation to which Godfrey belonged until
his early death at the age of twenty-seven. The Hallam and American
companies had played more of Shakespeare than any other one thing,
somewhat of Beaumont and Fletcher, and more or less of Restoration
drama; and these combined influences appear in Godfrey's work. There
are traces from "Hamlet," signs of "Macbeth," evidences of "The Maid's
Tragedy," and responses to the Restoration interest in pseudo-oriental
subjects. Yet the play should not be dismissed with these comments
as though they were a condemnation. What is more to the point is the
fact that "The Prince" is very admirable as a piece of imitative
writing. The verse is fluent and at times stately. The construction
as a whole is well considered. The characters are consistent, and
their actions are based on sufficient motives. Many a later American
dramatist fell far short of Godfrey both in excellence of style and in
firmness of structure and characterization. Had Godfrey lived and had
he passed out of his natural deference for models, he might have done
dramatic writing quite equal to that of many a well-known successor.
The twentieth-century mind is unaccustomed to the "tragedy of blood."
A play with a king and two princely sons at once in love with the
same captive maiden, a jealous queen, a vengeful stepson, and a court
full of intriguing nobles, a story which ends with the accumulating
deaths of the six leading characters, hardly appeals to theatergoers
accustomed to dramas which are more economical in their material. But
Godfrey should be compared with his own contemporaries, and, all things
considered, he stands the comparison well. The type of poetic drama
he attempted reoccurs later in the work of Robert Montgomery Bird,
Nathaniel Parker Willis, George Henry Boker, and Julia Ward Howe, and
reappears in the present generation in plays by such men as Richard
Hovey and Percy Mackaye.
The second notable play was Robert Rogers's (1730?-1795) "Ponteach: or
the Savages of America," published in London in 1766. The fact that
it was not produced at the time must be laid to managerial timidity
rather than to defects in the play, for it has some of the merits of
Godfrey's work in the details and construction. Two reasons sufficient
to put a cautious manager on guard were its criticism of the English
and its treatment of the churchman. For the play as a whole is a
sharp indictment of the white man's avarice in his transactions with
the Indians, in the course of which a Roman Catholic priest is by no
means the least guilty. Traders, hunters, and governors combine in
malice and deceit, undermining the character of the Indians and at
the same time embittering them against their English conquerors. A
play with this burden, written so soon after the Seven Years' War,
had no more chance of being produced than a pacifist production did
from 1914 to 1918. Godfrey's treatment of the Indians seems at first
glance unconvincing, but this is chiefly because of the way he made
them talk. All the savages and all the different types of white rascal
hold forth in the same elevated rhetorical discourse. This fact, which
constitutes a valid criticism, should be tempered by the recollection
that generations were yet to pass before anything lifelike was to be
achieved in dialect writing. Cooper's Indians are quite as stately
in speech as Rogers's. Yet, like Cooper, Rogers endowed them with
native dignity, self-control, tribal loyalty, and reverence for age
as well as with treachery and the lust for blood. If "Ponteach" had
been an indictment of the French instead of the English, it is a
fair guess that American audiences would have seen it and greeted it
"with universal applause." As an Indian play it was followed by many
successors--Pocahontas alone was the theme of four plays between 1808
and 1848. As a race play it broke the trail not only for these but for
others which branched off to the negro theme--from "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
and "The Octoroon," before the Civil War, to Sheldon's "The Nigger," of
1911. As a problem-purpose play it was the first American contribution
to a long series which never flags entirely and which always multiplies
in years when class or political feeling runs high.
The third notable American play--a success of 1787 and the first of
many successes in its field--was "The Contrast," a comedy by Royall
Tyler (1757-1826). Its purport is indicated in the opening lines of the
prologue:
Exult each patriot heart!--this night is shewn
A piece, which we may fairly call our own;
Where the proud titles of "My Lord! Your Grace!"
To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.
Our Author pictures not from foreign climes
The fashions, or the follies of the times;
But has confin'd the subject of his work
To the gay scenes--the circles of New York.
There is a complacency of pioneership in this and a hint at servility
among other playwrights which are not strictly justified by the facts,
but the prologue is none the less interesting for this. It is quite
as true to its period as the content of the play is, for it displays
the independence of conscious revolt, exactly the note of Freneau's
"Literary Importation" written only two years earlier (see p. 78) and
a constantly recurrent one in American literature for the next fifty
years.
Tyler's play is a comedy of manners setting forth "the contrast between
a gentleman who has read Chesterfield and received the polish of Europe
and an unpolished, untraveled American." This is reënforced by the
antithesis between an unscrupulous coquette and a feminine model of all
the virtues, and between a popinjay servant and a crude countryman,
the original stage Yankee. As far as the moral is concerned the play
makes its point not because the good characters are admirable but
because the bad ones are so vapid. Manly, the hero, is well disposed
of by his frivolous sister's statement: "His conversation is like
a rich, old-fashioned brocade, it will stand alone; every sentence
is a sentiment"; and Maria, the heroine, is revealed by her own
observation that "the only safe asylum a woman of delicacy can find
is in the arms of a man of honor." Yet the contrasts lead to good
dramatic situations and to some amusing comedy, and the play is further
interesting because of the fund of allusion to what Tyler considered
both worthless and worthy English literary influences. The extended
reference to "The School for Scandal" as seen at the theater by
Jonathan is acknowledgment enough of Tyler's debt to an English master.
"The Contrast" is the voice of young America protesting its superiority
to old England and old Europe. It had been audible before the date of
Tyler's play, and it was to be heard again and again for the better
part of a century and in all forms of literature. In drama the most
famous play of the type in the next two generations was Anna C. O.
Mowatt's "Fashion" of 1845. "Contrast" was furthermore a forerunner
of many later plays which were descriptive without being satirical,
a large number of which carried New York in their titles as well as
in their contents. These doubtless looked back quite directly to the
repeated successes of Pierce Egan's "Life in London," but they had all
to acknowledge that Tyler was the early and conspicuous playwright who
had
confin'd the subject of his work
To the gay scenes--the circles of New York.
The fourth and last play for any detailed comment here is "André"
(1798) by William Dunlap (1766-1839). Dunlap asked for recognition, as
Tyler had done, on nationalistic grounds,
A Native Bard, a native scene displays,
And claims your candour for his daring lays;
and he took heed, as Rogers seems not to have done, of the risk he was
running in entering the perilous straits of political controversy in
which "Ponteach" was stranded before it had reached the theater:
O, may no party spirit blast his views,
Or turn to ill the meanings of the Muse;
She sings of wrongs long past, Men as they were,
To instruct, without reproach, the Men that are;
Then judge the Story by the genius shown,
And praise, or damn it, for its worth alone.
Party feeling was high at the time over the opposing claims of France
and England--"The Rival Suitors for America," as Freneau called them
in his verses of 1795. "Hail Columbia," by Joseph Hopkinson, made an
immediate hit when sung at an actors' benefit less than four weeks
after the production of "André," and made it by an appeal to broad
national feeling. And Dunlap, after a slip of sentiment in the first
performance, kept clear of politics, and showed tact as well as daring
by making the Briton heroic, though a spy, and by his fine treatment
of the unnamed "General," who was evidently Washington. Dunlap's play
showed a ready appreciation of theatrical effectiveness. It was the
work of a playmaker rather than a poet, and the verse had none of
the elevation of Godfrey's or Rogers's. It was far better than the
declamatory stage efforts of the Revolutionary years by Brackenridge,
Leacock, Low, and Mercy Warren, and it was the best early specimen of
the historical romance for which there is always a ready patronage.
Dunlap is more significant as an all-round man in the early history
of the American theater than as a pure dramatist. He was a good judge
of what the public wanted, and fairly able to achieve it. What he
could not write he could translate or adapt. He turned Schiller's "Don
Carlos" into English, and it failed; but he made a great success of
Zschokke's "Abaellino" and translated no less than thirteen plays of
Kotzebue. A comic opera, a dramatic satire, a farce, or an interlude
seemed all one to him in point of ease or difficulty. From 1796 to 1803
he produced more than four plays a year under his own management at the
Park Theater in New York. He continued as a manager till 1805 and was
connected with the theater again in 1810-1811. Finally, to cap all, in
1832 he published in two volumes his "History of the American Theater,"
which, though inaccurate in many details, is full of the personal
recollections of men and events that no amount of exact scholarship
could now unearth.
The really auspicious beginnings in American play-writing up to 1800
were hardly followed up in the period before the interruption of
the drama by the Civil War. One man stands out, John Howard Payne
(1791-1852). Starting as a precocious boy actor and a dramatist whose
first play was staged at the age of fifteen, he developed into a
reputation greater than that of Dunlap, but in the perspective of time
little more enduring. His "Brutus" was played for years by well-known
tragedians, and his "Charles II," in which Washington Irving had a
hand, was long successful as a comedy. But he was too prolific for
high excellence, and he did nothing new. Now and then men who wrote
abundantly produced single plays of rather high merit though of
imitative quality, such as Robert Montgomery Bird's "Broker of Bogota."
There was a generous output, but a low level of production; tragedies,
historical plays, comedies of manners, local dramas, social satires,
melodramas, and farces followed in steady flow. Successful novels of
Cooper, Simms, Mrs. Stowe, and writers of lesser note were quickly
staged, but no one of undoubted distinction came to the fore. Writers
in other fields, like Nathaniel Parker Willis, the essayist, George
Henry Boker, the poet, and Julia Ward Howe, turned their hands at times
to play-writing with moderate success. But it is significant that the
conspicuous names of the period were names of actors and producers
rather than of playwrights. The history of the American stage has been
unbroken up to the present time, but it was not until near the end of
the century that the literary material presented on the stage became
more than a vehicle for the enterprise of managers and the talents
of actors. This later stage will be briefly discussed in one of the
closing chapters of this book.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
CRAWFORD, M. C. The Romance of the American Theater. 1913.
DUNLAP, WILLIAM. History of the American Theater. 1832.
HUTTON, LAURENCE. Curiosities of the American Stage. 1891.
MOSES, MONTROSE J. Famous Actor-Families in America. 1906.
MOSES, MONTROSE J. The American Dramatist. 1911.
SEILHAMER, G. O. History of the American Theater, 1749-1797. 3 vols.
1888-1891.
TYLER, MOSES COIT. Literary History of the American Revolution, 2
vols. Vol. II, chap. xxxii.
WINTER, WILLIAM. The Wallet of Time. 2 vols. 1913.
=Collections=
MOSES, MONTROSE J. Representative Plays by American Dramatists,
Vol. I. 1918. Vols. II and III in press.
QUINN, ARTHUR H. Representative American Plays. 1917.
=Special Articles=
GAY, F. L. An Early Virginia Play. _Nation_, Vol. LXXXVIII, p.
136. 1909.
LAW, ROBERT A. Early American Prologues and Epilogues. _Nation_,
Vol. XCVIII, p. 463. 1914.
LAW, ROBERT A. Charleston Theaters, 1735-1766. _Nation_, Vol.
XCIX, p. 278. 1914.
MATTHEWS, ALBERT. Early Plays at Harvard. _Nation_, Vol.
LXXXVIII, p. 295. 1909.
NEIDIG, W. J. The First Play in America. _Nation_, Vol.
LXXXVIII, p. 86. 1909.
QUINN, ARTHUR H. The Early Drama, 1756-1860. Cambridge History
of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap. ii.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
The best available sources of material are the collection of A. H.
Quinn, which contains three of the plays mentioned in detail, and the
first volume of the collection of M. J. Moses, which contains all four,
and a half dozen more from the early period.
* * * * *
There is no need of suggesting specific topics in connection with
the different plays. Each one may be read with reference to its
story content--the kind of plot, of characters, of scenes, of
episodes--or with reference to the skill with which it was written--the
construction, the characterization, the supply of motives for action,
the dialogue, the prose or verse style--or with reference to the
personality of the author and the "signs of the times"--the purpose
of the play, the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic character and
prejudices of the author.
* * * * *
If the student is working toward a report--written or oral--he will
arrive at a satisfactory result only as he limits himself to one very
definite subdivision and presents his findings in detail.